Ultrasensitive Doppler based neuronavigation system for preclinical brain imaging applications

Ultrasensitive Doppler is a recent medical imaging technique enabling high sensitive acquisition of blood flows which can detect small vascular features without contrast agents. Applied to cerebral imaging of rodents, this method produces very fine vascular maps of the brain at high spatial resolution and leads to functional imaging of brain neuronal activity. These vascular networks contain crucial information about organs structure, and could be used as landmarks to 3D navigate the brain and register external atlas to the data. This study investigates a first step using a 2D correlation-based method to locate in real time young rat, rat, or mouse brain vascular prints in a 3D functional brain atlas.